Campus protests may help Donald Trump win

If you operate in highly educated circles, it’s easy to get the impression that young people are passionately engaged in the Gaza issue. But a recent Harvard Youth Poll asked Americans aged 18 to 29 which issues mattered to them most. “Israel/Palestine” ranked 15th out of 16 issues listed. Issues such as inflation, jobs, housing, healthcare and gun violence were much more pressing.

Especially since 2016, it has become clear that if you live in a university town or in one of the many cities along the coasts where highly educated people tend to congregate, you can’t use your own experience to generalise about American politics.

In fact, if you are guided by instincts and values honed in such places, you may not be sensitive to the ways your movement is alienating voters in the working-class areas of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia. You may come across to them as privileged kids breaking the rules and getting away with it.

Over the past few decades, many universities have become more ideologically homogeneous and detached from the rest of the country. As my colleague Ross Douthat noted recently, Columbia students who study 20th-century thought in the “core curriculum” are fed a steady diet of writers such as Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault from one ideological perspective.

Writing in The Atlantic, George Packer quoted a letter that one Columbia student wrote to one of his professors: “I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept into every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So, if you come to Columbia believing in ‘decolonisation’ or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief.”

These circles have become so insular that today’s progressive fights tend to take place within progressive spaces, with progressive young protesters attempting to topple slightly less-progressive university presidents or organisation heads. These fights invariably divide the left and unify the right.

Over my career as a journalist, I’ve learnt that when you’re covering a rally, pay attention not just to protesters; pay attention to all those people who would never attend and are quietly disapproving.

If you were covering the protests of the late 1960s, for example, you would have learnt a lot more about the coming decades by interviewing George W. Bush than you would have by interviewing one of the era’s protest celebrities such as Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman was more photogenic in the moment, but Bush, and all those turned off by the protests, would turn out to be more consequential.

Over the past few days, the White House and Senator Chuck Schumer have become more critical of lawbreaking protests. They probably need to do a lot more of that if we’re going to avoid Trump: The Sequel.